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Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Introduction

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Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Introduction Connecting Histories in Afghanistan Shah Mahmoud Hanifi Introduction The Historical Location and Conceptual Framing of Afghanistan Old Market Time and New State Space from the Silk Road to the Indian Ocean The emergence of new states tends to transform old market relations. Modern states are 1 fundamentally territorial entities, while markets are essentially time-bound to various daily, seasonal, and political calendars. But markets and states also overlap and share temporal and spatial interests in such things as cities. This generality is all to say that there is a range of possible relationships between markets and states in time and space that oscillate between complimentary and oppositional polarities. In the case of Afghanistan, we are dealing with very old markets and a very new state, and the 2 Afghan state has not fared well in terms of market integration. The state structure that took shape in and around Qandahar under the direction of Ahmad Shah Abdali/Durrani in the mid-eighteenth century had deep roots in both Iran and India. Ahmad Shah was born in the Mughal district of Multan on the Indus river plain, but he gained political recognition to the west in the service of the Turco-Iranian ruler Nadir Shah Afshar. Ahmad Shah's use of Qandahar as the first capital of the Durrani Afghan state reflects the city's long-term function as transit market for the brisk overland trade between Mughal India and Safavid Iran that had deeper historic origins in exchanges between Mesopotamian and Indus valley civilizations.1 These overland routes exposing two ancient worlds to one another were complimented by a series of aquatic linkages that integrated port city and hinterland markets across the Indian Ocean world encompassing South and Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and East Africa.2 Qandahar can be seen as positioned amid a set of commercial routes and networks with a generally southerly orientation. Ahmad Shah's son and successor Timur Shah transferred the Afghan capital from Qandahar 3 to Kabul in 1775–6, and in 1809 Mountstuart Elphinstone made the first official colonial contact with Timur's son Shah Shuja at Peshawar, the Durrani winter capital city at that time.3 Kabul and Peshawar fall within a set of ancient commercial routes known collectively as the Silk Road.4 The Silk Road represents a more northerly commercial axis connecting the Chinese and Mediterranean worlds. Civilizations and emporia, and the routes within and between them, rose and fell across the Silk Road during its long history. These historic ebbs and flows occurred according to different rhythms in the north than among the port cities and empires associated with them to the south across the Indian Ocean. Kabul generally enters Silk Road discussions in the context of the Greco-Bactrian period lasting between roughly the © 2008 Columbia University Press www.gutenberg-e.org/hanifi 1 of 26 Connecting Histories in Afghanistan Introduction Shah Mahmoud Hanifi sixth century bce and the first century ce that was centered in Balkh but had a distinct presence in locations such as Begram in the Kabul valley. Peshawar is generally viewed as the center of the Silk Road culture area known as Gandhara. Gandhara has been variously and often quite liberally dated, but the culture seems to have flourished during roughly the first few centuries CE when Buddhism was patronized by a number of rulers and dynasties including the Kushan Emperor Kanishka in the second century. It is important to recognize the wide assortment of cultural exchange between Bactria and Gandhara spawned a wide assortment of smaller movements and developments in Afghanistan, and beyond. For example, Hadda near contemporary Jalalabad and Bamiyan in central Afghanistan were once thriving centers of Buddhist learning and innovation, sites of interreligious pilgrimages, and locations of cultural achievement. The colonial construction of Afghanistan involved some very aged market settings, and Timur 4 Shah, not the British, transformed Kabul into a capital city of the Durrani polity. However, the colonial emphasis on Kabul as the sole political capital of an emerging Afghanistan had important consequences for Kabul as a commercial center and also for the city's market relations with Qandahar and Peshawar. Kabul's "rise" as a political capital entailed a reconfiguration of the city's role in domestic and transnational commercial circuits and networks. The body of this book considers transformations in a triangulated economic relationship between Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar that crossed two distinct political spaces to form an interactive consortium of colonial frontier markets. Markets and Their Transformation: Mobility, Money, Machines, and Texts Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar are ancient market settings between one and two thousand 5 years of age. In a long-term historical perspective, Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar have combined in varying proportions exchange, finance, storage, and consumption activities. Despite these broad structural similarities, each market has been distinguished by special functions through historical eras. Over the long term, these three markets have interacted dynamically and together with the smaller markets between them and in their respective orbits this commercial zone has served to connect wider supraregional economic networks in Central and South Asia. In conceptual terms, markets are centers of production, exchange, and circulation where 6 goods and services become commodities through coexistence and interaction that is either directly or ultimately mediated by standards of value measured in currency, either cash money as reflected in retail market prices or book monies of account as used in the fiscal registers of states and large merchant firms. The commodification process occurs through exchange and the medium of currency, and markets are places where cash money and other forms of moveable and fixed commercial capital accrue and are transformed. The exchange functions © 2008 Columbia University Press www.gutenberg-e.org/hanifi 2 of 26 Connecting Histories in Afghanistan Introduction Shah Mahmoud Hanifi of markets attract the interest of commercial actors in other markets as well as political authorities, and Islamic states typically involve the institution of muhtasib, or (chief) market inspector. The activities and prosperity of any market or state is contingent on interaction with other markets and states. Markets are locations where movements of people and things intersect and where relationships between people and things are reproduced and transformed. In market settings, social groups can be identified through the commodities they engage and control. Market settings can be examined, therefore, with attention to the commodities being exchanged and the financial instruments involved in the transaction, the communities represented in the transaction, and the political context of the exchange. Market exchanges can be interrogated, then, with a few basic questions in mind. What was and who were involved in the exchange? How did the transaction happen in technical fiscal terms? What was the role of the state or other regulatory agency within the marketing activity, if any? This book poses those basic questions to nineteenth-century Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar. 7 Concerning commodity groups and trajectories of movement, the export trade in dried and fresh fruits and nuts from the Kabul and Qandahar districts to India was perhaps the most prominent and lucrative component of the economies of all three localities. Indian merchants financed this high-volume export of Afghan fruits and nuts, and Peshawar was an important base for the large numbers of bankers and financiers active in this trade. Peshawar's "natural" displacement as a staging area for wider distribution of fruits and nuts to South Asian markets where they were in high demand was dramatically transformed during the course of the nineteenth century as a result of political developments emanating from both adversaries in the two Anglo-Afghan wars. Similar questions about other commodities generally moving to the south, such as timber, hemp, felt, horses, sheep and its derivate wool and woolens, hides, and meat, and opium will generate different answers about the role of state authorities and local actors. Flows of tea, sugar, textiles, industrial equipment, and its technical expertise in the opposite northern direction occurred across the same routes but had different commercial and political motivations, possibilities and constraints for the actors. These commodity "counterflows" completed the commercial circuit and they entailed separate consequences for actors connected to the respective commodities or commodity groupings in each market on the return trajectory.5 In the first instance, the body of this work seeks to answer a small set of basic questions about the material, social, and political dimensions of market exchanges and commodity movements among Kabul, Peshawar, and Qandahar during the 1800s. In the course of striving for that basic goal, a number of other fundamental issues informing 8 the political economy of this frontier zone will be considered. Labor processes are addressed from the perspectives of sedentary production and mobile circulation and redistribution. Fruit and nut production involved relatively sedentary laborers and very mobile accountants and transporters. The producers themselves are viewed primarily through the bankers and bureaucrats who financed, marketed, and
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